PPTP VPN in Jaunty and Intrepid

[SabreWolfy]

This worked for me. Use at your own risk. YMMV. Edit: See post #4 below for an important update to this post ...

I've bleated previously here and on Launchpad about how PPTP VPN worked perfectly under Hardy and was broken under Intrepid and Jaunty. For me, this was a "deal-breaker" because I need PPTP VPN access. I have not upgraded my desktop Hardy machine for this reason. I did upgrade my laptop to Intrepid and now to Jaunty and got around the problem by using PPTP VPN in a Xubuntu Hardy VirtualBox.

I've spent the evening looking at this again and I've managed to get PPTP VPN working on my Jaunty laptop. I'm not a PPTP or VPN expert by any means.

I used this post as starting point, so thanks to kryptoz. The problem as I can see it is that Network Manager 0.7 (Intrepid and Jaunty) and the associated PPTP plugin are broken. Under Hardy (Network Manager 0.6.6) everything works. There are many posts detailing the myriad problems with Network Manager 0.7. However, using the Network Manager applet is simply a front-end to calling PPTP and PPPD which actually make the connection (I think).

My solution does not involve the Network Manager applet at all. The connection is established by calling PPPD. The pptp-linux and ppp (for pppd) package must be installed and the pptpd package as well (I think).

1. Add the following to /etc/ppp/chap-secrets:

Username   PPTP   Password   *

2. Create /etc/ppp/peers/vpn1. The 'peers' folder may be owned by group 'dip' so get around that by adding yourself to the group (I have no idea if this is a good solution, but it worked). Add the following to the vpn1 file:

pty "pptp remote.gateway.address.here  --nolaunchpppd"
name Username
remotename PPTP
require-mppe-128
file /etc/ppp/options.pptp
ipparam vpn1

3. Edit the options.pptp file as required. I commented out the 'refuse-chap' and 'refuse-mschap-v2' lines.

4. Establish the VPN connection with:

sudo pppd call vpn1

or

sudo pon vpn1

5. Drop the connection when you're done with:

sudo poff vpn1

That establishes a VPN connection but I could not get any traffic through it. Therefore, create '/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/route-traffic' as follows. I don't know why the file needs to have that name or be located in that folder, because it does not appear to be executed automatically. Thanks to this site for this information:

#!/bin/bash
NET="10.0.0.0/8"
IFACE="ppp0"
route add -net ${NET} dev ${IFACE}

Make the file executable.

Replace the "10.0...." address with the range of addresses you need to access on your remote machine. For me, this was the same range as that which I originally included when setting the VPN up in Hardy. It may look like "10.2.0.0/16" for example. The values don't have to be in the "10" range (mine were not).

So, to get the VPN up in Jaunty, I did the following (in /etc/ppp/ip-up.d):

sudo pon vpn1
sudo ./route-traffic

Edit: See post #4 below for an important update to this post ...

[AntiBodies]

this is really lame

i to cannot get the pptp vpn network manager plugin to work

it gives no feedback as to what is happening.. sometimes coming up with failed messages

ive been coming accross a few things that just arn't working in jaunty and have been regressions.. what is up with this? i suppose it is the nature of foss software but man it eems like things go 1 step forward 3 steps back

[SabreWolfy]

PPTP VPN worked for me in Hardy but not since. The scripts presented in my first post above are working well for me now. Hardly an ideal solution though -- it's such a pity that a great OS like Ubuntu which is meant to be a serious competitor to the established ones, is brought down by silly issues like this -- having to drop to a command line and hack away at scripts to establish a VPN connection! There IS a PPTP PVN plugin, there IS a network manager, bugs HAVE been reported since Hardy, etc. It irritates me because it is bad for Ubuntu and will turn people away. The vast majority of users are not going to have the time or inclination to wade through my first post and hack away at config files in order to establish a VPN connection. They'll just ditch Ubuntu as a half-baked effort and return to other OS's which "just work". It's only the "techies" who have time and inclination and interest to play and hack to get stuff to work. The average user needs it to work. I've been following the problems with PPTP VPN since Intrepid. Nothing has changed it seems for Jaunty. At least a fairly simple work-around does exist, as I have explained above. I'm no expert on PPTP or VPN at all. I know there are different kinds like Cisco and OpenVPN, etc. and I don't really know the differences. All I know is that to get my PPTP VPN to work in Jaunty, I have to run those little scripts. In Hardy, I clicked on the Network Manager plugin, followed the wizard there and it worked. No problems. The file that is exported by that plugin is not readable by later versions in Intrepid and Jaunty. Bugs for this have been filed ages ago. Maybe in Karmic ...

[SabreWolfy]

Update: I've spent the last few hours using my PPTP VPN connection in Jaunty, as described in the original post (#1 above). However, I was experiencing a very strange problem. When I attempted to paste a URL into the remote ssh terminal, only the first few characters would appear and then the connection would hang. The connection would also hang when I attempted to generate "large" amounts of traffic, such as when taking a long 'ls' or 'cat'ting a large file. Some searching led me here, which reminded me that I needed to set the mru and mtu values (which were present in the exported settings file from Hardy). I don't know what values these should really have, but the following worked for me. Edit the vpn1 file mentioned earlier and add:

mru 1412
mtu 1412

Worked for me!

[virkang]

Hi everyone,

I found a way to make it work in Jaunty (at least for me ...).
- When you configure the VPN connexion, go to the "advanced" settings"
- Uncheck "EAP" at the top
- check the "mppe" parameter
- Try to connect to your microsoft VPN server, i should work now

I hope this trick will help you out there ...

[Major_Kong]

Hi everyone,

I found a way to make it work in Jaunty (at least for me ...).
- When you configure the VPN connexion, go to the "advanced" settings"
- Uncheck "EAP" at the top
- check the "mppe" parameter
- Try to connect to your microsoft VPN server, i should work now

I hope this trick will help you out there ...

Doesn't work for me. I get the "secrets" error message.

Any fresh ideas to make the network-manager work properly ?

[SabreWolfy]

It's broken in Intrepid and Jaunty AFAIK; hence my long post starting this thread, which describes the work-around I am using.

[FrancisT]

It's broken in Intrepid and Jaunty AFAIK; hence my long post starting this thread, which describes the work-around I am using.

PPTP is working for me in Jaunty with the network manager applet. You just have to disable EAP and enable MPPE. Beofre I disabled EAP i got a bunch of weird errors though

However it isn't perfect. I'm having issues with SAMBA possibly to do with split horizon stuff. Fortunately the only thing I really need to do is FTP, SSH and Rdesktop and all those work fine

[carmadamus]

Worked for me. Thanks for the tip.

[dmaximos]

So I'm one of those noob users who decided to give Ubuntu a try b/c I'm sick of Microsoft and the viruses that come with it. I've been researching all over the web about how to get VPN to work in Ubuntu. So far I am able to get it to work except all of my network traffic goes through my work vpn. I tried clicking on the "Use this connection for resources only for resources on its network" hoping that I can remote desktop to my computer and have all my local network traffic use my fios, but it doesn't work.

Am I understand that this is a bug or is there some configuration issue that I'm not following. I can dual boot to XP, but I'd really like to use Ubuntu instead. Is there any documentation on this tool? TIA